Republicans Maths Skills Suspect - They Admit!

[Guest fountainhall]

Don’t ya just love it! Holding the country to ransom is one thing. Getting your figures screwed up is surely somewhat more elementary. Turns out Speaker Boehner miscalculated and his plan is in reality a whopping US$370 billion short. Instead of the $1.2 trillion he told the nation about, the spending cuts over the next decade he identified will only save $850 billion. Hence the need for a pause whilst new figures are worked out and legislation rewritten.

 

Perhaps we should invite Mr. Boehner to a tea-party where the basic elements of mathematics can be explained On second thoughts, just let him continue his love fest with La Palin and her cohorts. No doubt their screws will screw up again in time.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/27/debt-crisis-republicans-plan-bungle

[Guest]

A left of centre rag like the Guardian will need no encouragement to knock the Republicans.

[Rogie]

Taken from the Grauniad article quoted above:

 

The White House said on Tuesday it was working with Congress to devise a "Plan B" that might attract enough support. The two sides have been deeply divided for weeks, with Republicans demanding deep spending cuts and Democrats anxious to include tax rises as a major part of the deal.

Ah, Plan B - the answer to all our woes!

 

Britain's Chancellor is being urged to change tack in order to stimulate a very sluggish economy. Rather like a dodgy bit of prestidigitation, guess what he might conjure up out of his sleeve? Why, Plan B of course. . .

 

Nice interweaving comment here from Fountainhall:

 

Perhaps we should invite Mr. Boehner to a tea-party where the basic elements of mathematics can be explained

 

It seems the Tea Party are being rather vocal in this debate. Can anyone explain in simple layman terms what the 'Tea Party' are and what they stand for?

[Guest fountainhall]

A left of centre rag like the Guardian will need no encouragement to knock the Republicans.

And how I wonder would the lying, underhand, in-cahoots with the cops Murdoch right wing sleaze rags describe it? "Prophet Boehner just a few bucks from a slam dunk", perhaps?

 

Oops, wasn't it the Guardian which unmasked Murdoch and his cohorts as the crooks they've always been?

 

After Fox News announced the missing billions, a respondent on the Fox News site said this -

 

What Fox News meant to say is that Boehner made a $350 billion dollar goof. But who needs math when flag-waving and Nascar will do?

http://nation.foxnews.com/rep-john-boehner/2011/07/26/cbo-boehner-plan-doesnt-cut-trillion

 

[Guest fountainhall]

Can anyone explain in simple layman terms what the 'Tea Party' are and what they stand for?

An army of Sarah Palin clones, some of whom just happened to get elected to Congress last year. They have moved the balance in the Republican party even further right - and are a hideous view of what is to come if the frightful La Palin gains more support.

 

Here’s the start of an interesting piece from (once again) The Guardian which might explain more.

 

Poor Karl Rove. He masterminded George W Bush's rise to the White House in 2000, but a decade later, can't seem to find a credible GOP presidential candidate to support. What's a Republican kingmaker to do?

 

He's already alienated the party's two divas – Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann – either of whom might still get the nod. He's battled Palin publicly for months, accusing her of sabotaging the GOP's future. (She, in turn, calls Rove a Republican "good ol' boy".) And he just led the charge demanding that Bachmann produce her medical records after concerns surfaced about her health and "fitness" for office.

 

Rove, the one-time star protege of GOP "attack dog" Lee Atwater, has never been known to play fair – or even nice. But let's face it: a lot of people have doubts about whether Palin is presidential timber. Even a strong majority of Republicans don't want her to run. But the latest Washington Post poll indicates that she's still the conservative with the broadest and most popular base. And if she runs, she's likely to displace Bachmann as the party's No 2.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/27/karl-rove-bush-republicans

 

This will draw howls of criticism from some quarters, but it does seem as though the American Empire is really starting to crack from within. And with China waiting in the wings, I'm not sure that's a good thing (even though I am a major admirer of much of what China has achieved).

[Guest fountainhall]

Just ran out of time to rewrite my last post. I wanted to add something about the US national debt.

 

What I find amazing in American politics is that no-one, absolutely no-one ANYWHERE seems to be standing up and shouting: “But hold on, guys - who ran up that debt in the first place?”

 

In recent decades, it was not Kennedy/Johnson (Democrats) for debt as a percentage of GDP actually fell from 55.2% at the start of Kennedy's term to 38.6% at the end of Johnson’s term (even with the financing of the Vietnam war). Nor was it Clinton (Democrat) who started out with 66.1% but also reduced debt to 56.4% at the end of his 2 terms.

 

No, the big spenders were the Republicans. First, their darling, Ronald Reagan. At the start of his Presidency, the national debt was 32.5%; at the end 53.1%. George Bush Senior (Republican) took it further, ending after 4 years with 66.1%. So Reagan/Bush more than doubled it.

 

Bush Junior (Republican) enters at 56.4% and in his 8 years the debt rises to 84.2%. Not double, I grant you - but 49% is quite a whopping increase.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms

 

Well, my maths seem to be slightly better than Speaker Boehner’s, for it is blazingly clear that the party which increased the debt – massively – is the party which is now screaming about no more spending and no more increase in debt. Yet, raise the issue of reversing Bush Junior's hugely irresponsible tax cuts, and they all go apoplectic about penalising job creators! Then lead the discussion to closing loopholes for the rich and for major corporations (like News Corporation!), and they shout you down.

 

As the immortal Bard would undoubtedly have put it: "The is something rotten in the U S of A."

[TotallyOz]

I am embarrassed at American politics. If they don't get a deal done that is fair, I'll vote against any incumbent in office. If Obama signs a bill that repeals part of his health care bill, I'm done with him.

 

It is a sad state of affairs when you feel that your country has less intelligence than Thailand. I love Thailand but the people here are often uneducated and stupid. IMHO, the American people are slightly better educated and even more stupid. What a bunch of fools to buy all the shit that gets thrown at them. I grow more weary of the USA every day!

[Guest fountainhall]

This is part of an interesting article on the CNBC Marketwatch site this evening. Titled "Four things Republicans used to Believe", it was posted on July 18 but I just noticed it.

 

Taxation: The Republican Party has long favored low tax rates as a way to encourage economic efficiency, but its leaders have always recognized that some taxation is necessary and good. Under the old Republican philosophy, the purpose of taxation is to raise the revenues needed by the government. They believed, in theory, that the government shouldn’t spend money it didn’t have, so sufficient revenues were needed.

 

Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically in his first year in office, but when the deficits rose, he smartly agreed to raise taxes 12 times, including a broad tax-reform bill that eliminated many loopholes and removed many provisions of the tax code that distorted economic incentives.

 

Today’s Republican Party has abandoned the principle that some taxation is necessary. The party has fully bought into the “starve-the-beast” rhetoric espoused by Grover Norquist and other anti-tax zealots. It has adopted a rigid libertarian philosophy that equates taxation to tyranny, which argues that the government has no right to your money. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean all taxes are immoral.

 

For today’s Republicans, the proper level of taxation is no longer a question of paying for needed services in the most efficient manner, but is strictly a moral and political matter. The proper level is zero, and only political obstacles stand in the way of achieving that goal.

 

A strong presidency: Republicans have long favored a strong presidency, especially in foreign affairs . . . It seems as if the Republicans do have a consistent principle when it comes to the president’s war-making powers: Republican presidents are the unquestioned commander-in-chief of the armed services and may start wars wherever they please, but Democratic presidents aren’t even qualified to order lunch, much less boss the troops around.

 

Protecting our planet: Republicans used to be conservatives in the truest sense of the word. They favored sensible laws to conserve the water, air and land. The Environmental Protection Agency was created by Republican President Richard Nixon . . .

 

Today’s Republicans reject almost all government actions to protect the environment, saying they kill jobs. They want to drill for oil and gas everywhere, they want the EPA to stop regulating pollution, and they categorically reject all scientific evidence for climate change. They are so dead-set against conservation that they voted to kill a regulation (approved under Republican President George W. Bush) requiring that Americans use light bulbs that actually emit more light than heat.

 

Universal health coverage: It’s no secret that today’s Republican Party loathes the idea of universal health-care coverage. It believes requiring Americans to buy coverage is unconstitutional and immoral. One of its most cherished goals is to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

But did you know that the Affordable Care Act — derisively known as ObamaCare — is essentially a Republican plan, modeled after a 1993 Republican health-care bill and the Massachusetts state law signed by Mitt Romney?

 

. . . It was sponsored by 19 Republican senators, including Bob Dole, Pete Domenici, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Dick Lugar, Alan Simpson and Ted Stephens.

 

You may not recognize all those names, but you should know this group was the Republican establishment in 1993. And that Republican establishment was far to the left of today’s Republican Party.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/four-things-republicans-used-to-believe-2011-07-18?link=MW_story_insert

[Rogie]

I could understand an organisation like the Tea Party if their natural 'home', in this case the Republican Party, was wishy-washy / just a little right of centre, but reading that last post the current incarnations of Republicanism come across as obnoxiously right-wing. I would like to think that the 'man in the street' Republican voter is nothing of the sort and is a jolly decent fellow. So why the need of the Tea Party? Does the Tea Party reflect the views of Joe-average Republican or is it some awful monstrosity that has risen out of the depths and is thrashing around happily causing mayhem without the need for accountability?

[Guest fountainhall]

the Tea Party . . . come across as obnoxiously right-wing

I suggest that's a major understatement.

[Guest fountainhall]

Another interesting piece in the (left-leaning ) Guardian today.

 

Quite what was going through the minds of the hardcore Republican holdouts on Thursday night is hard to fathom. Partly, one imagines, they could see that the plan proposed by their leader, House Speaker John Boehner, would get shot down in the Senate – as the Democrats there were threatening to do – and so were unwilling to blot their conservative credentials by backing a futile compromise.



 

This is not the first time that Boehner has proved himself to be an inept parliamentarian. But this time Boehner was out-played by the tea party, the Club for Growth and even Sarah Palin, all pushing for the conservative rump to oppose his plan on the grounds that it didn't go far enough in throttling the government.

 

Palin even put out a chilling message on Facebook – that's modern politics for you – before the planned vote on Thursday, hinting at primary challenges from the right against those Republicans voting for the Boehner bill.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2011/jul/29/us-debt-crisis-boehner-republicans

 

I wonder if these hold-out Republicans remember what happened to Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolution. After the 1994 mid-term elections with, for the first time in 40 years, a majority in the House, Gingrich became Speaker. He and his revolutionaries then held the government to ransom and actually forced its longest-ever shut down. Did the electorate blame the incumbent Clinton administration? Nope. They returned Clinton to power.

 

Gingrich later faced 84 ethics charges (athough 83 were eventually dropped). He stood down in 1998. I wonder what will happen to Boehner. Given that a considerable majority of Americans think any agreement on the budget and debt ceiling “should include a combination of spending cuts and tax increases,” Mr. Boehner’s future could be, shall be say, 'interesting’.

 

A CBS survey conducted between 15 and 17 July found that -

 

66 percent of Americans believe that the deal to raise the debt ceiling should include both spending cuts and tax increases. Only 28 percent said they thought the deal should contain spending cuts exclusively, and a mere three percent wanted it to include tax increases only.

 

Indeed, the desire to see an agreement that contains both elements spans the political spectrum: 55 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Tea Party members, 71 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Independents said they support such a plan . . .

 

When it comes to finding fault for the budget standoff, it appears that Americans place more blame on Republicans in Congress than on the president. Forty-nine percent of voters said they faulted Republicans for politicians' failure to agree on a deal, while only 29 percent said they blamed Mr. Obama. Thirteen percent said both are to blame.

 

Views were similar during the budget standoffs in 1995 and 1996. Then, more Americans found the Republicans in Congress to be at fault than Former President Bill Clinton.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20080494-503544.html?tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesArea

 

A bummer for Boehner, to be sure!

[Guest fountainhall]

"WHATEVER IT IS, I'M AGAINST IT!"

 

Groucho Marx got it right - summed up the Tea Party and the right-wing view decades ago.

 

from the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers (1932)